Google Hiring Offer’s Field Sales Staff in 17 Major U.S. Markets

There have been questions about Google’s desire and willingness to ramp up face to face sales in local markets. Their attempted acquistion of Groupon seemed be to focused on a quick development of an on-the-ground, locally focused sales team. Discussions about their early efforts and ability to succeed in selling local revolve around this question. Last week’s job postings indicated that they were looking for new hires in Seattle for “Commerce Sales team [members which will] play a critical role in growing Google’s new Commerce related businesses, such as Google Offers, through large-scale SMB acquisition programs.”

10 thoughts on “Google Hiring Offer’s Field Sales Staff in 17 Major U.S. Markets”

I agree Mike. Google is taking its Local penetration efforts to the next level of getting a higher friction with the field & SMBs (which are the essence of what is Local all about).
Seems like a new-old approach, after all- where there are (on line) profits, there will always be some Google intentions towards it.
Does the days of lack of Google’s customer care in the Local arena are coming to their end?

I would absolutely guess so on the Portals! And community managers. And additional local products.

@Earl
There were at least 4 job descriptions in each city… I grabbed the first of the links I could find so it is likely that if one is filled one or more of the others might be available. We don’t know when these were posted either… and in a city where there are already lots of Groupon sales people it might be easy to find an already trained sales staff.

@Puresheer

Certainly Google has been upping their service game across the board as they increasingly engage the local smb. First with an actual number to call with Tags/Boost and then with across the board phone support on Adwords and now this product. That doesn’t resolve the contradiction that they face with their “free” products like Places. There may be more “touch” points but it is not clear to me that they have yet figured out how to reconcile to the two sides of the house.

Right now, only very small agencies, on a fairly small scale, have been able to be the humans between Google algorithms and Small, 10 people or less, businesses.

One interesting thought I had, and I pose it as a question, will Google start actually helping local businesses rank on the map?

It seems to me that if Google did that, it wouldn’t be very long before everyone migrated over to get help from them, but then again, Google will see just how frustrating it can be helping people rank organically and turn everything right back over to Agencies. It would also put Google back in a position to just offer paid placement like back in the beginning of web time.